I read with amazement your assertions that the Lusitania was armed, that she carried ammunition in defiance of American laws, and that our official inspection of her was careless.  Your own Government has itself abandoned the false charge that the Lusitania carried guns, and no longer makes such a ridiculous claim; while the German reservist who pretended to have seen the gun has admitted that he lied and is now serving a term in prison for perjury.  You are not familiar with American shipping-laws which expressly permit the carrying of certain types of ammunition on passenger vessels, and you are, of course, quite ignorant as to what inspection of the vessel was made in New York, for you were in Germany at the time.  Your assertions were made wholly on the basis of the false statements furnished you in Government-controlled papers.  You had no means of determining the truth or falsity of the statements, on the basis of reliable and impartial evidence; yet you did not hesitate to make assertions which your own Government now practically admits were not well founded.  The fact that the learned men of Germany have throughout the war violently supported the German position by reckless charges and wild assertions, paying no regard to the necessity of basing such charges and assertions on impartial evidence, instead of accepting with child-like simplicity the unsupported statements of the German Government, has destroyed the confidence of Americans in the ability of the German educated men to think and reason fairly and honestly about the war.

The manifestos of the German professors, issued to Americans, did much to alienate American sympathy from Germany; for the bitterness and unreasoning fury of the documents, combined with the entire absence of evidence to support the many reckless statements made in them, did much to convince Americans that the German position was not capable of honest, logical, dispassionate, manly defence.  There has never at any time been any such outbreak of fury and bitterness among the English or French people.  While there are individual exceptions, taken as a whole the press, pamphlets, and private letters of the English and French, dealing with the war, have from the first been characterised by a self-control and calm determination, which in the case of the French has especially astonished Americans; for we expected the French to be more excitable.  Taken as a whole, the Teutonic literature has from the first been characterised by an uncontrollable bitterness and violent denunciation of the enemy and of neutrals; which has also surprised Americans, for we expected you to be more logical and self-contained than the French, instead of less so.